Scientists have created an electronic ‘skin’ than can lend a sense of touch for amputees who use prosthetic hands. The skin’s inventors say that when the ‘e-dermis’ is layered on top of a prosthetic, it brings back feeling through the fingertips. Made of fabric and rubber laced with sensors to mimic nerve endings, e-dermis recreates a sense of touch as well as pain by sensing stimuli and relaying the impulses back to the peripheral nerves. The work which appears in Science Robotics shows it’s possible to restore a range of natural, touch-based feelings to amputees who use prosthetic limbs.

“After many years, I felt my hand, as if a hollow shell got filled with life again,” says the anonymous amputee who served as the team’s principal volunteer tester. “We’ve made a sensor that goes over the fingertips of a prosthetic hand acts like your own skin would,” says lead researcher Luke Osborn, a biomedical engineering graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s inspired by what is happening in human biology, with receptors for both touch and pain.”

“We can have a prosthetic hand that is already on the market and fit it with an e-dermis that can tell the wearer whether he or she is picking up something that is round or whether it has sharp points,” he said. The ability to detect pain could be useful, for instance, not only in prosthetic hands but also in lower limb prostheses, alerting the user to potential damage to the device. Human skin contains a complex network of receptors that relay a variety of sensations to the brain. The network provided a biological template for the research team.

Advances in prosthesis designs and control mechanisms can aid an amputee’s ability to regain lost function, but they often lack meaningful, tactile feedback or perception, says Osborn. That is where the e-dermis comes in, conveying information to the amputee by stimulating the amputee’s nerves in a non-invasive way, through the skin, says the paper’s senior author, Nitish Thakor, professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Neuro Engineering and Biomedical Instrumentation Laboratory.

The e-dermis technology could make robotic systems more human, and it could also expand or extend to astronaut gloves and space suits, says Osborn. The researchers plan to further develop the technology and better understand how to provide meaningful sensory information to amputees in the hopes of making the system ready for widespread patient use.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 21, 2018 10:40 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).